VMI cadet honored with Cancun honeymoon

Yes, he Cancun.

VMI senior Mark Miller of Forest already had a May graduation and June wedding planned for this year. Now, the honeymoon is pretty much taken care of as well.

Miller won a drawing Friday at Monument Terrace for a seven-day, seven-night trip for two to the Mexican resort, available any time before next October. The winning ticket was chosen by Ruth Perry, a Gold Star mother, during the weekly “Support the Troops” rally in downtown Lynchburg.

For Miller, this will be foreign travel with a slightly different twist — in all probability, no one will be shooting at him.

The Jefferson Forest High School graduate served two tours of duty in Iraq with the Marine Corps’ 4th Combat Engineers’ Battalion and was wounded in the Jan. 26, 2005 rocket-propelled grenade ambush that killed former Liberty University student Jesse Strong. Miller spent two months in a hospital recovering from shrapnel damage to nerves and muscles in his right forearm, an injury that prevented him from closing his fingers entirely.

“I can still pull a trigger, though,” he said at the time.

And also hold a drafting pencil, which will be helpful when he enters graduate engineering school at Virginia Tech this fall. His VMI graduation was delayed two years when his Reserve unit was called to active duty.

In other words, this is exactly the type of person Donna Brooks had in mind when she passed up the Cancun trip herself.

Brooks, a native Oklahoman who established a home in Lynchburg several years ago, won the initial drawing — held to help the local chapter of Vietnam Veterans of America with some money for veterans’ projects — last fall.

“She was pretty excited about it at the time,” said Neil Bohnert, who sold Brooks the ticket. “But then her husband died unexpectedly, and she called me and said she’d like the prize to go to an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran, preferably one who had been wounded and received a Purple Heart.”

Bohnert called longtime Marine Corps League leader Steve Bozeman, a Purple Heart recipient himself, “because he knows everybody,” and Bozeman came up with a list of 11 local servicemen who fit Donna Brooks’ specifications.

“When I started going down the list, though, the three officers on it all asked to defer to an enlisted man or reservist,” Bozeman said, “A couple of others had active duty commitments.”

One note that jumped out at me was this from Chip Eldridge, who served in the Special Forces:

Thank you for the opportunity; however, with my current work schedule and a move happening for me in June of this year ... I will not be able to take the trip. Please pull my name and afford the opportunity to one of the remaining nine individuals. I am certain that they are more deserving.”

More deserving? Eldridge had his left leg blown off in Afghanistan and went back to active duty wearing a prosthesis.

“I wasn’t surprised that the officers responded the way they did,” said Bohnert. “That’s why they’re leaders, because their men are more important.”

The list was finally whittled down to three — Miller and two Army veterans, Nathan Chapman and Colin Pilch.

Bill Underwood might have been able to go, except that his tour in Iraq may be extended.

Please remove my name from the eligibility list and tell the winner to do a tequila shot for me,” he wrote to Bozeman.

And that’s an order.